The first step in setting up a pay-per-click advertising program is setting your daily budget — how much you want to spend per day. Daily budgets are great because they allow you to allocate your spend evenly through the month to get consistent coverage, rather than just blowing it all in the first couple of days.
You then begin the process of adding keywords, refining keywords, and perfecting your ads to get the best performance possible. That’s an iterative process, and it often takes several months to get your campaigns really running on all cylinders.
During that time, though, the daily budget is forgotten. You “set it and forget it.” That can often be a problem, though, if all the new keywords you’ve added over the months have caused your campaigns to have much more potential traffic than they had in the beginning. In other words, where you may have been running at 75% of potential in the beginning (i.e. giving up 25% of potential impressions), that may have dropped to 50%, 25% or even lower with all your new keywords. At that point, you’re foregoing a much more significant portion of potential traffic than you were before.
The worst case, though, is when you originally set your budget high enough to capture all available impressions because you wanted to run full speed. Over time, you don’t realize that more and more often you’ve been bumping up against that cap, and you’ve been foregoing more and more impressions as you add more keywords. You’re happy with your performance, but are completely unaware that it could be even better.
So take a few minutes today to check your daily budgets against your biggest days of the week. If you find that you’re hitting your budgets every day, you may want to make some adjustments to allow more traffic to get to your site.
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